Good afternoon everyone:

Tomorrow will mark the 50th anniversary of the first Amtrak trip – from New York’s Penn Station to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. In the subsequent fifty years, the system would grow to more than  21,400 miles of track connecting 500 destinations across 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada:

The centrality of maintaining, upgrading, and expanding both passenger and freight rail is reflected in the $80 billion set-aside in the President’s infrastructure plan. That is in addition to another $85 billion for the modernization of public transportation systems and $20 billion for transportation projects for disadvantaged communities (one hopes that the elected leadership of Southeast Michigan is paying attention).

I suspect that many of us have a soft-spot for rail travel. So many kids when I was growing up had electric toy train sets, Thomas the Train pieces, or wooden tableaus organized around the local locomotive:

It brought to mind one of the quirkier episodes of my father’s budding architectural career.

In 1939, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, an avant-garde photographer, sculptor, print-maker, and painter who had fled his professorship at the post-Weimar German Bauhaus led by Walter Gropius, established the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago – the American version of the Bauhaus called at the time the School of Design, which survives today as part of the Illinois Institute of Design.

Shortly after that,  my  father, after a particularly frustrating day at his desk at a local architectural firm, went for a drink at a local pub in Chicago’s loop. He struck up a conversation with a charismatic, but brooding, guy sitting by himself at the bar. The conversation turned to architecture, and Dad quickly realized that he was talking to Moholy-Nagy. Continuing until the earliest hours of the morning, Moholy-Nagy ended up inviting my father to come head the Architecture Department at the New Bauhaus. Dad accepted, and ran the department from 1942 until Moholy-Nagy’s death in 1946.

The two did a number of commercial projects together, which brings me back to trains.

One of the most fascinating commissions came from the B&O Railroad to re-design virtually every aspect of the company. From the train seats to the ticket windows . . . from the sleeper cars to the restaurant car.  Moholy-Nagy was profoundly creative, but didn’t draw well. My father, on the other hand, was a brilliant draftsman. So, for each of their projects, they would talk and sketch and argue for hours, and then Dad would try to put on paper what he thought they had agreed on. That was the process on the B&O project, as well.

They hammered out wonderful concepts for the new reclining seats, for the restaurant car, and, the most wondrous, for a brand new idea nobody had yet tried:  a “vista-dome” a two-level car with a glass ceiling, permitting to see the horizon and the sky - which, of course, has become a hallmark of Amtrak.

Back to the future .

Rip

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